Azure Strategy and Implementation Guide

Up-to-date information for organizations new to Azure, 3rd Edition

Peter De Tender, Greg Leonardo, Jason Milgram

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838989538
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Warehousing
• Index: Computer Science

Learn Azure's cloud capabilities with the help of this introductory guide to employing Azure for your cloud infrastructure needs.

Key Features

• Get a clear overview of Azure's capabilities and benefits, and learn how to get started efficiently
• Develop the ability to opt for cloud architecture and design that best fits your organization
• Leverage Azure opportunities for cost savings and optimization

Book Description

Microsoft Azure is a powerful cloud computing platform that offers a multitude of services and capabilities for organizations of any size moving to a cloud strategy.

Azure Strategy and Implementation Guide Third Edition encapsulates the entire spectrum of measures involved in Azure deployment that includes understanding Azure fundamentals, choosing a suitable cloud architecture, building on design principles, becoming familiar with Azure DevOps, and learning best practices for optimization and management.

The book begins by introducing you to the Azure cloud platform and demonstrating the substantial scope of digital transformation and innovation that can be achieved by leveraging Azure's capabilities. The guide further acquaints you with practical insights on application modernization, Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) deployment, infrastructure management, key application architectures, best practices of Azure DevOps, and Azure automation.

By the end of this book, you will be proficient in driving Azure operations right from the planning and cloud migration stage to cost management and troubleshooting.

What you will learn

• Deploy and run Azure infrastructure services
• Carry out detailed planning for migrating applications to the cloud with Azure
• Move underlying code class structure into a serverless model
• Use a gateway to isolate your services and applications
• Define roles and responsibilities in DevOps
• Implement release & deployment coordination and automation

Who this book is for

Azure Strategy and Implementation Guide Third Edition is designed to benefit Azure architects, cloud solution architects, Azure developers, Azure administrators, and anyone who wants to develop an expertise in operating and administering the Azure cloud. A basic familiarity with operating systems and databases will help you grasp the concepts covered in this book.

1

Understanding the Azure Cloud

Introduction

Azure is a powerful platform that offers a multitude of services and capabilities for organizations of any size moving to a cloud strategy. Whether you are a start-up needing only the base infrastructure for running your company's website, or you are a multinational operating all over the world, any kind of organization today can start deploying and migrating workloads to Azure. The first step in taking advantage of the many capabilities offered by Azure is careful planning. It might be tempting to just dive in and go ahead with deploying Azure resources. However, it should be emphasized that building a cloud environment can require a similar level of planning and detail as building your own datacenter services!

This chapter is all about providing you with a clear overview of Azure's capabilities, its benefits, and how to get started in the correct way. It also touches on how to migrate existing workloads to the cloud and cover the tools that Azure provides to streamline and smoothen this process.

Next, this chapter introduces you to business-related questions where the cloud can help in innovation and digital transformation, as well as how to handle identity and security in the cloud. Last, it covers IT infrastructure-related questions on how to build your enterprise-ready networking, how to migrate file services, and what tools are available in Azure for monitoring and day-to-day operations.

Starting from the assessment phase, where you will receive guidance on what your organization's cloud readiness looks like, this chapter, and indeed the whole book, will help you understand the core strategy for app modernization with Azure.

Once you decide to start deploying and using resources in Azure, we will examine best practices around migration planning, migration tooling, and what processes Microsoft makes available for you to make this process as smooth as possible.

Aside from workload migration, you need an understanding of deploying and running Azure infrastructure services. Think of resources such as Azure networking, storage, and virtual machines, and how to manage these. Don't forget that Azure allows you to do more than just run your virtual datacenter in the cloud. More and more organizations are looking at public cloud solutions for hosting Platform as a Service-based workloads. This means you still run the business applications, but you are not deploying them on virtual machines anymore, and you are also not managing most of the infrastructure, such as networking and storage. Besides running infrastructure and platform services, you might also think of migrating your workloads to serverless and microservices solutions using containers. Having this flexibility regarding the environment you use in the public cloud, whether traditional infrastructure services, platform services, or containerized workloads, is really one of the core benefits of the cloud and a chief way in which Azure's technical innovation can support your business needs.

Furthermore, you must think about your organizational governance and compliance requirements. Even in your own datacenter, you don't just want anybody walking in and deploying new hardware, deploying new servers, expanding storage, and so on. The mindset around governance, security, and control remains, even if you start using cloud services. The good news is that Azure comes with an extensive list of governance and compliance capabilities, several even as a core part of the underlying platform. Others are offered as flexible, configurable services where you can take control.

Whereas the first few paragraphs in this introduction section mentioned the public cloud as an overall strategy for running your IT workloads, know that from here on we shift to Azure as Microsoft's public cloud solution. Before tackling more technical questions and aspects of what it takes to migrate and deploy your applications to Azure, let's talk about some scenarios where Azure can be of help in business innovation.

Business innovation with Azure

While cloud computing environments such as Azure have been around for 10 years now, the tipping point for cloud adoption by enterprises was seen around 2016, where for the first time an IDG survey found that over half of the IT environments of surveyed businesses were hosted in the cloud¹.

The "first generation" of cloud adoption was characterized primarily by the deployment of virtual datacenters. In this first generation, organizations deployed new or migrated existing virtual machine workloads into Azure for a variety of reasons: some migrated to the public cloud to save on datacenter-running costs, while others wanted to take advantage of the easier and faster method for the deployment of infrastructure. Other organizations looked to Azure to streamline their business processes, to use it as a test setup, or to use the cloud as an affordable disaster recovery solution. For others, the huge potential for performance and scale, as well as flexibility (especially during peak usage), were the core reasons for adopting Azure.

The "second generation" of the public cloud arrived when rather than purely seeing value in running and managing virtual machines, some organizations saw benefit and innovation in moving to platform services. This mainly removes the focus and dependency on virtual machines, networking, and storage, and switches to a new approach with the core focus being on the application itself. Since platform services don't require much infrastructure, they are easier to manage. There is also less time spent patching or maintaining servers, which typically results in the improved uptime of your applications as well.

A "third generation" is currently in its early stages, where organizations are adopting serverless and microservices, as well as using native cloud services to build cognitive solutions and artificial intelligence solutions. Azure makes it easy to deploy these kinds of back-end services, where less and less knowledge is needed to build the underlying infrastructure. For most of these services, there is not much, sometimes even nothing, to manage on the infrastructure side.

Azure, at its heart, is a public cloud platform, but there are a variety of different cloud models available in the industry today. Let's run through the main ones.

Public cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud models

At a high level, many organizations are looking into deploying or embracing one (or more) of the following cloud models.

Public cloud

This is the typical cloud platform offered by a service provider. Such service providers include Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Rackspace, and Digital Ocean. In simple terms, the datacenter is managed by the vendor, and you consume the hosting part as a service.

Also, there is no dependency or integration with your existing on-premises datacenter. This is typically used by start-ups, Small-Medium Business (SMB) customers, or larger enterprises who want to build out a standalone environment outside of what they are running on-premises.

Hybrid cloud

In a hybrid cloud model, you are building an integration between your existing on-premises datacenter(s) and a public cloud environment. Most often, this is because you want to expand your datacenter capabilities, or you do not wish to perform a full migration to a public cloud-only model. Building a hybrid cloud typically starts with the physical network integration (in Azure offered by ExpressRoute or a site-to-site VPN), followed by deploying Infrastructure as a Service or Platform as a Service. Another aspect of the hybrid cloud is identity; Azure offers you Azure Active Directory as the identity solution. For hybrids, organizations synchronize (all or select) on-premises users and group objects from Active Directory domains to a single Azure Active Directory tenant. This allows for optimization in user and security management, offering users an easy but highly secure authentication procedure for cloud-running workloads.

Multi-cloud

More and more (enterprise) customers are looking at or currently using a multi-cloud strategy. Multi-cloud means using several public or hybrid clouds together. The benefit is using what is available. Imagine your business application relies on a service that is not available in your public cloud of choice, but might already be available in Azure. As long as you can integrate both worlds together in all aspects, such as security, supportability, skilled employees, and so on, there is no reason for not going in that direction. Looking at cost benefits could be another driver. Instead of running all workloads with the same public cloud vendor, it might be cost-effective to split workloads between different cloud vendors. Lastly, embracing things such as DevOps and Infrastructure as Code will also help you in adopting a multi-cloud strategy. Tools such as Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, and several others provide REST APIs that can communicate with different cloud back ends. As such, your IT teams don't have to learn different cloud-specific templates, but rather can focus on the capabilities of the tooling instead of focusing on the cloud capabilities as such. At the same time, it should be mentioned a multi-cloud strategy also comes with several challenges. Supportability, mixed skillset requirements of your IT staff, and overall complexity because of the need to manage different environments are probably the most critical concerns to warn you about.

Azure public cloud architectures

Now you have a better understanding of the different cloud models, let's focus some more on public cloud architectures.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Part of this first chapter is dedicated to migrating and running your business applications in an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, using similar concepts to those related to your on-premises datacenter, with virtual networking, virtual storage, and virtual machines as the main architectural building blocks.

However, that is not the only way that you can run your applications in Azure. As a segue to other chapters in this book, let me briefly describe where Azure can help in business innovation, or the digital transformation of your workloads, using other architectures besides virtual machines.

Platform as a Service options (App Service, SQL Database...

Table of contents

• Understanding the Azure Cloud
• Architecture Choices and Design Principles
• Azure DevOps
• Optimization and Management in Azure
• Index